Mechele Armstrong

I wanted to like this. I did. But in the end I don't really understand why I finished it. The premise was a good one and I think there would've been a lot of interesting ways to go about it. But. First what bothered me was that it was a gamer romance but not really from a gamer perspective. I'm not sure if it tried to be, but there was just too much explanation on things. This is something that bothers me actually, when there's too much explanation about the culture. I prefer to figure it out from the context, like going to a foreign country. "Show, don't tell" works for me.

In addition, it would be very hard for me to believe that someone who spends so much time in a game as Sam does would not consider her game friends real friends. And I also don't really believe that she wouldn't have told someone that important that she's a woman. Or that it wouldn't have come up. Well, that I could be ok with, but not the fact that she doesn't consider online friends real friends. And then there was the whole crazy woman plot that I just thought was completely unnecessary.

I liked the idea, but the execution could've been better.… (mehr)

For the Love of the Corps (Veterans) by Bobby Michaels, May 24, 2008

As usually I have finished in a session the latest book by Bobby Michaels. How he manages to write about hot and dirty sex and still gives a feeling of romanticism in the story I don't know. But when I closed a book by him I'm satisfied like I was when I was reading my first romance and when the sex was still a discovery (more than twenty years ago... I'm OLD).

Mike is a only son of a single mother. He has never had the chance to have a real sense of brotherhood during school and when he enters the Corps he bakes in the feel to have finally a "family". He loves the Corps and loves to be a Marine, but he has to admit that he even loves Scott, his boot camp buddy. Mike is a big man, very selfconsciousness of his strenght and proud of it, instead Scott is shorter and leaner. When they confess their reciprocate feelings, is easy for Mike to take the upper hand in the relationship. It's not a thing about being bottom or top (even if Mike could frankly admit he prefers to top) it's more a thing of how they rely one to the other. Even if Scott is more experienced and in the beginnins he is who teaches to Mike the joy of gay sex, it's Mike who is the engine of the relationship.

They spend five years in the Corps and they are happy, stolen moments during their assignments to be together. But then Scott is killed in mission, and Mike is wounded. His big body manages to recover, but his souls is teared apart: he only wants to die and be forever with his lover. But duty calls, and he finds himself again in the Corps: good, he thinks, a way to go again in mission and kill himself without no one suspect.

His new officer, thought, has other ideas: Paul is a outed gay (not in the Corps, obviously, but with his family and friends) and the first day he meets Mike, he decides he will have this man. Paul is on the opposite of Scott, bigger, bigger then Mike, and with a leader attitudine given him by his well-born and wealthy family. He is not accustomed to being refused and Mike finds himself swept away by this man. For Paul is so different from Scott, Mike can love again: the new relationship he has with Paul is completely different from before, he knows he can let the hand to another person.

As always my problem (but it's not a "bad" problem which prevents me from reagind the book, instead I eagerly bought it and read it as soon as possibile) with Bobby Michaels' novel is to "really" believe in the sex scenes: they are extreme, exagerate and very, very explicit. Graphic and physical. But maybe the "problem" is that I'm a woman and I think with a "woman" head.

The book deals with a lot of issue: gay Marine, the war first in Afghanistan then in Iraq, the disagree among the officers for some political decisions taken by Washington, gay marriage, even a little hint to the gay adoptation... And overall you feel the love that Babby Michaels has for the Marine (a "pure" love, don't think bad... well, maybe not so pure...). The book is for entertainment, and it reaches its scope, but I can hardly definy it a "light" entertainment.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1596326751/?tag=elimyrevandra-20… (mehr)